Missing In Action, Again

July 13, 1992

Sadly, it was predictable. The hope that missing American servicemen might be found alive in the former Soviet Union has been dashed.

"I think we are going to wind up with absolutely zero," reported Malcolm Toon, the former ambassador President Bush dispatched to Moscow after Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin disclosed that government records indicated that American military prisoners were transferred to Soviet labor camps.

While U.S. investigators will continue to scour archives in Moscow, it seems clear that Mr. Yeltsin's evidence of servicemen missing in action has turned to smoke, just as the evidence has in nearly all reports of MIAs.

Almost 20 years after the end of the Vietnam War, bones, fragments of bones and a few blurry photographs are the most solid proof that American servicemen were left behind on the far side of the world as enemy prisoners or unhonored corpses.

Yet the belief -- or wish to believe -- that there are live servicemen to be reclaimed is so strong that both a Senate select committee and a joint commission of the U.S. and Russian governments, of which Mr. Toon is co-chairman, continue the search for those missing in action.

These official inquiries are in addition to private MIA quests, whose supporters include unannounced presidential candidate Ross Perot, and a virtual sub-genre of Hollywood action movies. Sylvester Stallone as "Rambo" and Chuck Norris in a trio of "Missing in Action" films are just two of the super-tough stars who, to borrow their movie lingo, have "gone in after" MIAs.

Clearly, the idea of lost servicemen fascinates many people, even if only a few believe there are MIAs to bring home. Fewer still, out of sympathy to the families of the MIAs, dare deny the possibility. That is why Mr. Bush was right to send Mr. Toon on his urgent, but predictably futile mission.

As notoriously secretive as the former Soviet Union may have been, it seemed even more improbable that American prisoners should be hidden in its vastness than in the war-torn jungles of Southeast Asia.

According to the Pentagon, more than 78,000 Americans who fought in World War II and more than 8,000 who fought in the Korean

War are unaccounted for. The number missing in action in Southeast Asia is precisely 2,266.

Yet it is the memory of those few thousand that most troubles us still. As a nation, we cannot lay their ghosts to rest, just as we cannot lay to rest our guilt and anger about the sour war that took their lives